The Bible + Life

During my years of study in seminary, I worked at a funeral home. It was the best laboratory in which to learn the Bible and theology. Frequently, I saw dead bodies and attended funerals as I helped direct the families and friends of person after person to a hole in the ground where a once vibrant life would find its final resting place in a cemetery. One night as I was reading through Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology, a phone call came from Houston, Texas informing me that an entire family had been killed in an automobile accident.

I remember the shock as I wrote the details of the incident. The bodies of a mother, a six-year-old boy, a four-year-old girl, and two 18-month-old twin boys were on the way to the funeral home where I worked. The father was just about to be told what had happened to his family by the police department. I’ve never forgotten that experience, and I’ve never forgotten what the funeral home parlor looked like when I saw three caskets open containing the lives of five people who died a horrible death.

I was young (23 years old), but I had already experienced death in my own life. By this age, my father, mother, and brother had all died tragically. Two of my uncles had died and one of my cousins was killed when he was five years old. One of my best friends from high school was killed in an automobile accident. I’ve also experienced the death of relationships and the loss of jobs. By the time I was 30, life had become a series of losses that shaped my worldview in ways I once thought impossible.

I wish Matthew McCullough’s book, Remember Death: The Surprising Path to Living Hope, was available to me back then. Now, at 50, I am able to better understand all that death has taught me, and this book has been the catalyst for a deepened hope in the promises of God in Jesus Christ. But just what about this book is all that helpful? There are numerous titles about death and dying. The grief industry is a subculture all to itself. What is it about McCullough’s thoughts that are even worth reading in an already crowded space?

Of Losses and Crosses

Observe the modern Evangelical movement, and just beneath the surface, you see a pronounced death-avoidance. Some of the largest churches in the United States are led by pastors who preach the exact opposite of what McCullough writes in this book. Health, wealth, harmony, and prosperity are seemingly the byproducts of an accurate Christian theology. McCullough is aware of that, and he uses a skillful pen to dismantle these thoughts built on such flimsy scaffolding.

Make no mistake, this isn’t a book for the faint of heart. McCullough states the obvious fact that no one really wants to accept: “Death makes a statement about who we are: we are not too important to die,” he writes. “We will die, like all those who’ve gone before us, and the world will keep on moving just as it always has.” He admits when this fact finally penetrates our defenses, it is a “harsh, even terrifying statement.”

The book kindly bludgeons its reader. Yet, it is a mercy. “The truth is that nothing lasts, that you can never go back, and that therefore everyone loses everything to death.” Think about this for more than five minutes and it becomes disorienting. What exactly is the value of my life? This is where McCullough pushes hard.

Death raises questions about where our place actually is. Besides an organic mass that eats, sleeps, reproduces, and decomposes, who am I? What is the value of a life that doesn’t even exist in someone’s memory? The question is this: if my life turns to dust in the end, am I more significant than the stray dog picked apart by buzzards, the goldfish flushed down the toilet, or the cockroach crushed under foot? You still end up dead, just like the animals. In the end, no one resists nature. So, remind me, where do you get this idea that humans matter more than animals do?

The Horrible Truth

McCullough is a pastor in a university city. Holding a Ph.D. in history from Vanderbilt University, he stands before doctors, lawyers, and aspiring business leaders in the prime of their life every week in a rented school auditorium just off the Vanderbilt campus and teaches them about Jesus and the promises of God. He does this week after week not because he couldn’t do something else (he could), but because reading, thinking, and studying deeply about the Bible’s words has created a crisis of sorts for him that is not unique to him.

The truth is that life works like a savings account in reverse. Zoomed out to the span of an entire life cycle, you see that no one is actually stockpiling anything. You’re spending down, not saving up. Everything you have—your healthy body, your marketable skills, your sharp mind, your treasured possessions, your loving relationships—will one day be everything you’ve lost.

McCullough knows what he is up against. Modern culture lies to modern people. And in order to fully experience joy in this dying life, a new way of thinking must be learned. It is not automatic, and it does not come naturally to human beings—especially to the modern “church” culture that has been taught life is a continuing series of successes and wins. Knowing this, he helps his readers trace their thoughts home to their logical conclusion. By doing so, he helps Christians better know, understand, and apply the promises of God in the future to the problems of the present.

He does this by clearing away cobwebs around areas of the Bible often avoided. Case in point: the changing of the water to wine at the wedding in Cana—John 2. Far too often (if this text is even read or preached) this account in John’s Gospel is not understood for the true “sign” it is. “Packed into what may seem like a little random or offhanded showboating is a concentrated version of everything Jesus came to do,” he writes. This miracle is vitally connected to Isaiah 25 where the promise of God to remove death and its sting forever is clearly promised to the people of God. It is an incident packed full of meaning that points to the promise of Jesus to remove the ultimate experience of loss so that eternal life—both a quantity of life (eternal, never dying) and a quality of life (“a life beyond the reach of death”)—can be experienced by all who trust in him.

Ever the exegete, he is careful to mine the truth of the trajectory of John’s Gospel for his readers. With every turn of the page, McCullough’s readers are led first to the precipice and then to the promise (you really can’t appreciate the power of the latter without realizing the peril of the former). Jesus helps people “understand where his signs are pointing” all the while he is “warning of what blinds” them to his work. Many modern readers will find themselves numbered with the crowd who hurried to Jesus for yet another free meal (see John 6:26). “You’ve seen my power, but missed my point,” McCullough writes in what is surely the best phrase to explain so many modern readers of the Bible.

The Christian hope hinges on the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Nothing else will do. No other hope can provide anything other than a growing nihilism. Discontentment, envy, and anxiety are exposed for the frauds they are and how they rob life of its joy because they feed on what dies a little more with each passing day. By admitting the horror of the present life, McCullough reframes grief as he brings forward words from the past into the sorrows of the present so that the promises for the future can comfort and bring true and lasting joy. Moving from honesty to grief to hope is the clarifying process of growth in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. All who walk in this way will find an anchor for their soul even as their body dies.

Douglas E. Baker is Tenth Presbyterian Church’s current Church Administrator, having joined the team in 2018. He enjoys history, theology, and Chick-fil-A. He holds degrees from LSU, Johns Hopkins, and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

This world is full of sorrow because it is full of sin. It is a dark place. It is a lonely place. It is a disappointing place. The brightest sunbeam in it is a friend. Friendship halves our troubles and doubles our joys. — J.C. Ryle

As I watched people pass the casket to look upon the lifeless body of a young man who died of a drug overdose, I realized the community of drug addicts is often stronger in support and love than the community of the Christian church. Those suffering from drug addiction often support one another more intentionally than do the people of God. To be sure, sin lies at the bottom of coping responses that do not seek to find solace and comfort in the gospel, but the world in all its sinful manifestations often creates a community where the common experience of sin and its effects seem to be stronger than the grace of God in Christ. Surely, something is wrong.

A recent scientific survey revealed that nearly half of Americans feel alone (46 percent) or left out (47 percent). One in four Americans (27 percent) rarely or never feel as though there are people who really understand them. Two in five Americans sometimes or always feel that their relationships are not meaningful (43 percent) and that they are isolated from others (43 percent). The problem is so bad in the United Kingdom that Prime Minister Theresa May appointed a government post with the title, “Minister for Loneliness.”

Drew Hunter’s new book, Made for Friendship, is a book every Christian should read. Warning: It is hard to read, because as you do, you will soon realize just how few friends are truly in your life. This book is an enticement, of sorts. From the very outset it pulls no punches. The world in all its cruelty actually produces and promotes isolation and loneliness. Sin does that. It forces a person to deceive others as they commit acts that result in the exact opposite of what they really want—friendship.

This book lands at a time in the cultural landscape where individualism is the hallmark of personhood. To be strong is to be independent, a loner, a self-made man or woman. The problem? It isn’t true. Hunter’s book is the antidote to such lies. Hunter is a student of history, and he opens the book by presenting various theologians and their friends. The stalwarts of theological precision and preaching were, at bottom, great friends.

John Newton: “I think to a feeling mind there is no temporal pleasure equal to the pleasure of friendship.” John Calvin: “I think that there has never been, in ordinary life, a circle of friends so sincerely bound to each other as we have been in our ministry.” Jonathan Edwards: “Friendship is the highest happiness of all moral agents.” Augustine: “Two things are essential in this world—life and friendship. Both must be prized highly, and not undervalued.”

Friendship Fallacies
Friendship is one of the true necessities of life, Hunter maintains. Without it, life atrophies and can become “unraveled emotionally, psychologically, and even physically.” The ache for deep friendship is not something that is a result of the Fall. In some circles, it might seem fashionable to present friendship as a crutch that is given to fallen human beings by God in their struggle with sin as if the longing for friendship were, in some sense, a by-product of the Fall.

Hunter provides excellent exegetical work to sustain the point that Adam was lonely “before sin enters the world.” He correctly stipulates, “The first problem in human history, the first problem on the pages of Scripture, the first problem in any human life, was not sin—it was solitude.” Adam’s aloneness, therefore, was not “a result of his fallenness.” This is an “Edenic ache” that we all experience, and it is not solved by an exclusive relationship with God himself or by marriage. “Friendship is indispensable” because “God is a God of friendship.”

Lest you think the book is mere fodder for the romantics among us, Hunter dispels such notions. “Friendship is an affectionate bond forged between two people as they journey through life with openness and trust,” Hunter writes. Such “openness and trust,” however, isn’t for the faint of heart. Friendship is work.

Surely, we have all experienced supposed “friends” who were users or abusers in ways that made accountability a word to be avoided. “Friends” who all too quickly quote Proverbs 27:17 (Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another) as their “life verse” might best be avoided. Hunter does a masterful job of deconstructing bad hermeneutics and by doing so demolishes accountability groups and/or “friendships” (particularly among men these days) where one person constantly feels attacked and provoked to anger. “A sharp tongue speaks words like sword thrusts,” Hunter writes. He isn’t glib about the radical change in perspective that must come in order for a person to become a good friend:

Our hearts default to a posture of self-focus. I instinctively place myself at the center of my relationships. I tend to think about how often others have wronged me—how they have been inconsiderate, have expressed anger, or have gossiped about me. If we mainly think about the weeds that others need to uproot, and not our own, our relationships won’t flourish. Because this very impulse—this tendency to think about how they have failed us, rather than how we have failed them—is self-centered, and it will produce weeds. In order to cultivate true friendship, then, we must cultivate a posture of repentance.

The Faithful Friend
Thankfully, he doesn’t leave us to ourselves in order to find the true model of friendship. For this he points to the greatest friend—Jesus himself. Scene by scene, Hunter unfolds the beauty of Christ in all his fullness of friendship to those least deserving of it. The Lord Jesus Christ is patient when wronged, does not return evil for evil, willingly offers his life in the place of sinners, and commits to them an unwavering friendship through every trial of life. There is no friend like Jesus, and Hunter is at his best when pointing to the Christ of God.

The grief of friendship? Losing them. Not necessarily through betrayal or some other sin (though this happens quite often!), but through distance and finally, death. The mobility of our modern society can rip friendships apart in ways that cause severe grief. Just ask the wife who moved because of her husband’s job far away from her friends. Ask the man whose best friend was forced to re-locate away from his church. Ask the high school student who just waved goodbye to his best friend as the moving truck pulls out of the driveway.

Yet, death is ultimately the final enemy of friendship. It stalks all our relationships with the incessant whisper that the friend we love will soon be gone. Time is fleeting, and life is a vapor. Here again, Hunter provides the biblical theology of friendship that sustains weary ones with a word of encouragement. Friendships in the Lord Jesus Christ never end.

Many people think that eternal life will be boring. But think about your most joyful moments with friends. Now take that joy, multiply it by ten thousand, and project it into your eternal future. The whole of that happiness merely gestures in the direction of the joys to come. History ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but with the laugher of friends.

The hope of any author is that their book might live beyond their own circle of friends. For Hunter, this book accomplishes that goal because, in the end, the friend of whom he speaks, lives beyond his written words and points to the eternal Word—the Lord Jesus Christ, the friend of sinners.

Douglas E. Baker is Tenth Presbyterian Church’s current Church Administrator, having joined the team in 2018. He enjoys history, theology, and Chick-fil-A. He holds degrees from LSU, Johns Hopkins, and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

What does leadership look like in Christ’s Church? To begin to answer that question we need to remind ourselves that leadership works at different levels:

Christ is the king and head of the Church and his laws expressed in Scripture rule his assembly.

The apostles provide the divine revelation on which the Church’s order and ordinances are constructed.

Elders sitting on Session have delegated authority from Christ to teach, model, and implement his laws in the corporate life of each assembly. They serve by guarding the faith and the flock.

Deacons and deaconesses are to lead by serving the body of the church.

Leadership in more specific ministries emerges naturally from the body of Christ relative to the gifts and working of the Holy Spirit.

Every Christian believer is expected to take the lead in loving service of the Body.

What does Christian leadership under Christ and the instruction of the apostles look like? The answer is relatively simple—it is primarily ministerial, not magisterial. By definition, Christian leadership at every level is servant leadership.

I recently heard someone overstate this principle. He quoted the words of Jesus: “The Son of Man came to serve and give his life as a ransom for many.” The speaker then applied it to us generally, “we are here to serve and give our lives as a ransom for many.” This is sadly nonsense, for it fails to see the distinction as well as the continuity between Jesus and us.

The Lord Jesus is in fact the Servant of the Lord, promised in Isaiah, anointed with the Holy Spirit without measure, who would bear the sins of many. However, in his human nature he is also the model believer and saint.

I think we see these two aspects illustrated from the story of the feet washing in John 13. There the story hinges on two statements Jesus makes which apparently say opposite things: “you do not understand now” (meaning that after the Resurrection/Exaltation/Pentecost they will) and “you do understand” (where he urges them to follow his example). In other words, the text invites us to view the foot washing at two levels.

At one level, the action of Jesus in leaving his place, discarding his outer garment, donning the towel as the badge of the servant, pouring out water, washing their feet, and returning to his place are all set in the context of his saving mission. The introduction tells us it was Passover, his “hour” had come, and he “had come from God and was returning to God.” Specifically, what that means is spelt out in the reference to Isaiah’s vision of the Lord God of hosts: John adds “this Isaiah said when he saw Jesus’ glory and spoke of him.” Later, in John 17, he will speak to the Father of “the glory I had with you before the world was.” Jesus’ leaving his eternal place and taking on the form of a servant was unprecedented, unrepeatable, and utterly unique to him. He alone “poured out” his soul to death and he alone can cleanse his people so that they enjoy fellowship with him. That is the full meaning of the foot washing action which they would not understand until his exaltation and the coming of the Spirit.

Yet at another level, there was something they could understand. Luke tells us that after their last supper with Jesus they had “argued among themselves who was the greatest” —their question is grotesque in the presence of Jesus. Most likely the foot washing happened after this event. He was their Lord and Teacher and now he performed the action of the lowest servant. He had seen a need and had done what was required to meet it. They had been on the receiving end of that thoughtful, loving service. Of course, there was theological significance to it, but even its obvious elements held a lesson for them to emulate in their treatment of one another. Jesus was teaching them to lead in service. Luke records that Jesus countered their self-serving argument about who was the greatest by saying: “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over people and those in authority call themselves benefactors. But not so with you. Let the greatest among you be as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves.” That is the kind of leadership every true Christian can show—we can all take the initiative in service.

Once we grasp that principle, we can see how it works out in specific details of life:

Elders, for example, will not “lord it over the flock of God.” In other words, they will not abuse their power but use it for the common good.

People who aspire to be the church boss, like Demas (of whom Paul wrote, “Demas likes to have the pre-eminence”), will crucify their prideful ambition.

And for all the rest of us: “do not do anything out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.” “In love serve one another.”

Christian leadership, like Christian living, generally is about serving the servants of Christ and thereby serving Christ, who, by his Spirit, dwells within them.

Dr. Liam Goligher serves as Senior Minister of Tenth Presbyterian Church. He holds a Doctor of Ministry degree from the Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi. He has also served as Senior Minister in Ireland, Canada, London, England, and his native, Scotland.

Ligonier Ministries are putting out a series of podcasts called Open Book, beginning with never-before-aired recordings of RC Sproul and Steve Nichols discussing important books in Dr Sproul’s life. As T4G18 remember the life of Sproul (here), highlighting Sproul’s singular commitment to the Holiness of God as the organising principle of his life and ministry, this recent podcast is poignant for a couple of reasons: we hear his consistent passion for the doctrine of God; and we hear his assessment of our current situation – the situation he was soon to leave behind.Months before he died, a new book made it onto Sproul’s list of most important books. James Dolezal’s All That Is in God calls for a recovery of the classical, catholic, creedal and confessional doctrine of God. Along the way Dolezal makes necessary and gracious criticism of some of our favourite high-profile teachers and theologians in terms of their departure (sometimes deliberate, sometimes unconscious) from the simplicity, aseity, immutability, and impassability of God. If we get our doctrine of God wrong, everything else goes wrong.
For many the doctrine of the aseity of God exists only as a category in older dusty theology text books. It’s passing from everyday discourse and the operational foundations of modern theology into abstraction and obscurity has happened without the majority of folks batting an eyelid. Except of course RC Sproul along with a number of other notable exceptions like the late John Webster, James Dolezal, Scott Swain, Fred Sanders, Michael Allen, Sinclair Ferguson, the Ligonier teaching fellows, to name but a few. What is lost, when we lose the doctrine of God that Sproul showed us, is God himself in all His fullness.
Dr Sproul read Dolezal’s book twice. The holiness of God for Sproul was all about the holiness of God. Not just any God. Not a blank abstract creator who we must remember is sovereign, but the Triune simple, immutable, impassable, sovereign God of unbounded life and love, who is self-existent. This God, the Triune Holy one, reached out to those who were not holy so that we could know Him. To know the self-sufficient God gave Sproul goosebumps, he tells us. His life was dedicated to introducing us to this God. His legacy is all those people who saw the God he saw and feel those goosebumps at the mention of his Holy Name.
In this podcast, you can hear the passion of Dr Sproul for the God he loved and now sees face to face and we hear his deep concern for the situation he has now left behind. But when listening to the discussion in light of his passing, you can also hear a baton being passed along: all will be well with writers like Dolezal around. As Dr Sproul quips in this podcast “there are still seven-thousand that haven’t bowed the knee to Baal”. Surely Ligonier and RC Sproul have been – and through his writings and the Ligonier teaching fellows will continue to be – an instrument in God’s hands keeping us from idolatry.

If the nativity scenes in your house are like the ones in mine, there’s no hint that the characters experienced difficulty or pain surrounding the birth of Jesus. Shepherds, wise men, Mary, and Joseph all admire the Christ child in the warm glow of a cozy stable, smiles on their faces. Of course, Christmas did bring warmth and joy to these characters. But have you also considered the difficulty and strain they experienced surrounding Christ’s birth? Thinking about their circumstances reminds us that for God’s people, great burden and great blessing often coincide.Take Mary. The angel Gabriel appeared to her in Nazareth announcing that she was “favored” by God (Luke 1:28). But her circumstances probably didn’t make her feel favored. When she became pregnant by a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, friends and family surely cast dispersion on her, believing her baby was the result of sexual immorality and not a miracle. That’s what Joseph, her godly husband-to-be, thought until an angel told him differently (Matthew 1:19). For Mary, God’s favor led to stigma and having her plans for family life turned upside down.1
The situation was similar for Joseph. He planned to take Mary as his wife then build a family. God’s miraculous intervention was so jarring that his first thought was to divorce Mary before the angel explained. After Jesus was born, Joseph continued to experience hardship and interruption. When King Herod sought to kill Jesus, Joseph had to uproot his family and relocate to Egypt until Herod’s death.
The wise men weren’t exempt from burden either. In addition to the long journey required to find Jesus (they likely came from Babylonia, Persia, or even the Far East), protecting Him meant defying a king who wasn’t afraid to murder his enemies (Matthew 2:1-18).
What about the shepherds? When angels appeared to them in the fields surrounding Bethlehem, they were “filled with fear” (Luke 2:9). Then they had to leave their source of livelihood in the middle of the night to go worship Jesus (Luke 2:8-20), presumably an unsettling prospect for conscientious keepers of sheep.
Of course, the characters in the Christmas story experienced joy and blessing upon seeing Jesus. In that sense, warm nativity scenes are completely accurate. Scripture gives us no hint that they grumbled about the difficulties surrounding their trip to Bethlehem. Still, each of them had to endure burdens in order to trust God and honor His Son.This should comfort believers who find themselves burdened at Christmastime. After all, the holiday season, despite its joys, is a time when people feel lonely, depressed, overwhelmed by consumerism, and weighted down in myriad other ways. When facing such struggles, we should consider the example of Mary, Joseph, the wise men, and the shepherds. They too were burdened. But amid their burdens, they experienced the greatest blessing they would ever know by taking time to focus on Jesus.
German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer did the same when he found himself spending Christmas in prison for defying the Nazi regime during World War II. In a letter to his fiancée, he explained why he expected “an exceptionally good Christmas.”
“I used to be very fond of thinking up and buying presents,” he wrote, “but now that we have nothing to give, the gift God gave us in the birth of Christ will seem all the more glorious . . . The poorer our quarters, the more clearly we perceive that our hearts should be Christ’s home on earth.” This Christmas know that you’re not alone in your trials. But amid them, take time to appreciate the greatest blessing imaginable: friendship with Jesus and assurance of His eternal love.
————1 Content of this paragraph and the inspiration for this entire post are drawn from a sermon preached by Hershael York at Buck Run Baptist Church in Frankfort, Kentucky, December 15, 2013.2 This article was originally posted on the BibleMesh Blog on December 23, 2013.

It’s not uncommon to hear claims that sharing the Gospel is easy and that any follower of Jesus can lead nonbelievers to faith with relative ease, given the right method. Such claims aren’t entirely without merit. Evangelism is simpler than it’s portrayed at times, and any believer can do it. Yet examples from Scripture demonstrate it can be far from easy:

For Moses, faithfully sharing God’s Word meant standing eye to eye with a tyrannical pharaoh, declaring Yahweh’s identity, and calling the Egyptian leader to repent of his wickedness (Exodus 7-12).

Daniel called King Nebuchadnezzar to repent and follow the Lord (Daniel 4:27) even though the Babylonian monarch had demonstrated a willingness to execute followers of Yahweh when their actions appeared to undermine his authority (Daniel 3:1-30).

Stephen was stoned to death for preaching the Gospel to Jewish leaders (Acts 7:1-60).

For the apostle Paul, preaching the Gospel led to 39 lashes on five occasions; three beatings with rods; stoning; three shipwrecks; “danger from rivers . . . robbers . . . [his] own people [and] Gentiles”; “toil and hardship”; sleepless nights; hunger and thirst; and “cold and exposure” (2 Corinthians 11:24-27). Eventually, he was executed for his bold witness.

For preaching the message of Christ, Peter was arrested by Jewish leaders (Acts 4), arrested by King Herod (Acts 12:1-5), and eventually executed as Jesus had predicted (John 21:18-19).

The apostle John was arrested and beaten by the Jewish leaders as a younger man (Acts 4) and exiled to the island of Patmos in his old age (Revelation 1:9).

Even in giving the Great Commission, Jesus implied the difficulty of the task at hand by telling His followers, “All authority has been given to me” and commanding them to “remember” that He would go with them in the work of disciple-making (Matthew 28:18-20, CSB). It was a task possible only through Christ’s authority and with His personal presence. As Robertson McQuilkin and Paul Copan put it, merely “operating by technique, method and programming” without accompanying “reliance on the Spirit” will not yield “lasting, spiritual fruit.”[1]
That’s why the promise of the Great Commission is an essential companion of the command to “go” and “make disciples of all nations.” Overcoming the obstacles of fear, doubt, and opposition is possible only when we rely on the Spirit and grace of God. Paul said he “worked” at evangelism and church planting, “though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10). On another occasion, Paul said he “proclaimed” Christ, “struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me” (Colossians 1:28-29).
As it was in the Old and New Testaments, calling nonbelievers to follow the Lord can be difficult today. Yet when we remember Christ’s personal presence and, by faith, rely on His authority in our witness, we will find that the Gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16).[1] Robertson McQuilkin and Paul Copan, An Introduction to Biblical Ethics: Walking in the Way of Wisdom, 3rd edition (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014), 88.